Cockfight in Silungan

We returned from our trip to north Bali to find our street blocked by a large table holding offerings for a ceremony and a group of men huddled together nearby.  "Cockfight" said Dewa.

After we unpacked, I wandered over to see for myself.

A cockfight was just finishing.  Money was changing hands.  A losing rooster, still alive, lay in the gutter.

Watching the cockfight

the loser

a bet is paid off

butchering the loser

We'd been told that cockfights often occur during temple ceremonies.  I was struck by the contrast of the beautiful, painstakingly arranged offerings with the brutal violence of the cockfight.

table laden with offerings

Dewa Made Putra was there.  He owns the field next to our villa and often hangs around the front of the neighboring villa talking with one of his friends on the staff there.  One evening I had joined them in a dinner of roast chicken that they had cooked on a spit over a fire of coconut husks at the entrance to our driveway.  Another time I had bought coconuts from him that he had climbed a palm tree to cut down.  I had seen him on a few occasions holding his fighting rooster so wasn't surprised to see him there. Another cockfight soon began.

cockfight preliminaries

waiting to fight

A man wandered through the crowd holding a case filled with many small blades.  He would select blades to tie to the feet of the roosters who were fighting next.

It was getting dark, the flash on my phone stopped working as the battery was too low, I didn't know whether my photo-taking was welcomed, and I had seen all I wanted to see, so I left.

Seeing the cockfight was a reminder that we live in a poor, gritty, agricultural village.  Even though Silungan is only a few minutes from Ubud, it has an altogether different character and no services or shops for tourists. 

Our villa and the adjacent villa are plopped down in the middle of the grassy fields and palm trees on the outskirts of Silungan as if from a different planet.  We may be in their village, but we certainly aren't of their village.  So far they seem to tolerate our presence, and I hope they continue to do so.

These men around the cockfight are our neighbors in the village.  Not all the men we knew from the village were there.  Based on a few conversations we've had, opinion on cockfighting seems fairly evenly split, with roughly half participating and the other half staying away.  The reasons for staying away are a combination of distaste for the violence and not wanting to lose money gambling.

This was a small, informal cockfight.  Much larger fights are held in the Ubud area, and throughout Bali, in dedicated cockfighting rings that can hold hundreds of spectators.  A video taken by an expat living in Ubud at one of these cockfights can be found here.